App Showcase: How we use Rebex.NET in PHP Tools for Visual Studio

Here at Devsense (www.devsense.com), we develop a tool called PHP Tools for Visual Studio. We provide a whole PHP development environment for Visual Studio (and, recently, also for Visual Studio Code) which includes many subsystems that provide features like IntelliSense, Code Validation, Refactoring, Formatting, Testing, Debugging and Publishing (a more detailed list of features can be found here https://www.devsense.com/features).

We discovered Rebex.NET 7 years ago (2013) when we were designing PHP Tools’ publishing system. We evaluated many open source libraries and other commercial products providing transfer protocols implementation. But in the end, we decided to use Rebex.NET and now its components play an integral part in the publishing. We like how the interfaces are designed, it is reliable, actively developed and the support is great.

For PHP, a language oriented to web development, it’s important that the development environment is able to publish changes through both FTP/S and SFTP incrementally and debug a development server remotely (https://blog.devsense.com/2020/remote-debugging), as well as finally deploy the project to the production. By using Rebex.NET components, we could focus on our part of the process related to PHP and Visual Studio and we let the Rebex.NET handle all the transfer protocol related issues.

Another effect we highly value is the ability to react quickly to the continuous evolution in SSL/TLS protocols. There are constant changes in this field, new vulnerabilities are discovered, and IT administrators must react and implement new security recommendations constantly (e.g. by changing their cipher suites lists). As a development tools provider, we must adapt, so developers are able to publish their work. Luckily for us, we just need to update Rebex.NET components regularly, because they are doing this heavy lifting for us.

We’re also planning to use the library in other parts of PHP Tools for Visual Studio, e.g. directly in our PHP debugger for remote debugging through SSH tunnel. Currently, our users have to use another tool for that – Putty. Thanks to Rebex.NET, we will be able to provide this functionality out of the box soon.

We’re glad that Rebex.NET exists and we will continue being their paying customers.